Christine R. Quillian, CFA, CFP®

I grew up with Wall Street Week and CNBC. My mother was a traditional stock broker and worked for a couple of national name brand brokerage firms. She helped people take care of their money so that they could devote their time and attention to the things that mattered most to them. Clients outsourced important financial matters to her, freeing themselves to focus on other priorities.

Compared to many other people in my mother's office, she managed far more assets for her clients and yet explained that she tended to generate half the sales and commissions. For her, the priority was doing right by her clients, not selling products. Furthermore, I came to realize that the work she did was something very important, but that it wasn't explicitly taught to me in school.

Shepherding one's financial resources seemed to be something that people were supposed to figure out on their own. In that regard, it's a privilege to serve as a senior wealth manager for my clients at MONTAG. Clients hire us to eat, drink, sleep, and breathe the financial markets on their behalf, to specialize in interest rates and economic cycles, growth and value, equity, and fixed income securities so that they can take care of patients, manage real estate, practice law, and invent things, work I'm not inclined or particularly trained well to do.

I love that knowing my role allows clients to focus their time and energy on what really excites them. When meeting with a client for the first time, the conversation I like to have is about what is it that they need their money to do? Does the client come to us with a portfolio that they've inherited or a hodgepodge of accounts that they've been managing on their own?

Do they need it to grow? Do they have specific goals that they're aiming for? What does retirement look like? And then we begin to develop a set of investment objectives while also talking about which tools are available in the market. Investment objectives answer the question, what is it that you need your money to do? Most often that's some combination of capital appreciation, income, or liquidity that is making funds available for spending needs.

From there, my role as the portfolio manager is to survey all the tools in the financial markets toolbox to be familiar with the options and more importantly to determine which ones make the most sense for the job at hand, whether that's in general relative to each other and always in the context of the then current economic circumstances. I believe that the most influential force behind long-term wealth accumulation is the power of compounding and losses can severely disrupt that process.

Recall that 6% per annum for three years in a row greatly exceeds the results of plus 15, plus 15, and minus 15. So ideal equity investments will have two tailwinds at work: accelerating earnings growth rates and rising valuations. I believe macroeconomic conditions explain and predict much of the profitability and/or relative performance of most stocks in most sectors. Therefore, I pay close attention to the macro environment when making investment decisions.

And to paraphrase Berkshire Hathaway's beloved Charlie Munger, I aim to spend each day trying to become a little wiser than when I woke up.